The Saint of Lost Things (32 page)

Antonio woke in his car close to one a.m. the morning of May 21. “Goddamn it,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He tossed the blanket in the backseat and sped home to Eighth Street. As he approached the house, he noticed the lights in the front windows, the absence of the Fiuma’s Ford. He saw Ida on the stairs, waving the wooden spoon. Sleepwalking again, he thought.

M
ARIO STANDS, ARMS CROSSED,
at the window of Maddalena’s room in Wilmington Hospital. “The girl needs a name,” he says. Ida and Mamma stand beside him, Papà paces the other end, Father Moravia half dozes in the one comfortable chair. They’re all thinking it—have been for nearly a week—but Antonio’s opinion is the only one that counts, and he will not change his mind. Until Maddalena wakes, the baby will remain unnamed.

He sits on the bed beside his wife. He sees little resemblance between her and the baby, despite the nurses’ constant comparisons. “Trust us,” they say. “She’ll be as beautiful as her mother.” Maybe Antonio does not want to see the comparison. It would be easier if the baby’s features were as common as those on Nunzia’s plastic dolls, but they are not. She is a Grasso.

And yet the baby belongs to the nurses. According to them, Dr. McMenamin has handled her only once, the night he brought her into the world. It is the team of nurses who keep her warm, make the formula, feed her, give her oxygen treatments. She mostly lies alone, untouched in her heated cell, as if to trick her into thinking she is still in the womb.

One of the nurses, whose name is Brenda, has more than once told Antonio that his baby is stronger than the doctors think. She
may weigh only three pounds, but her signs and her color are good. She takes food well. She responds. Brenda says that doctors are too cautious, that she herself has personally seen babies smaller than this one leave the hospital healthy as a normal child. Sometimes, Brenda says, she has more faith in the sick than the healers.

It is Brenda who appears late on the fifth night, after the visitors have left, when the hall is quiet and Antonio is alone in the room with his wife. “Shh,” she says, as she nudges Antonio awake with her elbow. She shuts the door. In her arms she carries his precious daughter, covered head to toe in white blankets. Only her nose and eyelids and lips are visible. Brenda lays her facedown on Maddalena’s chest. “The heartbeats,” she says. “They might spark each other.” The baby squirms for a moment, then settles into the groove of her mother’s bosom, into the familiar rhythm of the blood. Antonio helps to hold her there, his hand on her bottom. Even through the blankets he can feel the life in her.

He and Brenda wait for a miracle, for Maddalena to open her eyes, to lift her arms and embrace her child for the first time. But there is no miracle. Mother and daughter go on sleeping. After a few minutes, Brenda grows nervous, gathers up the baby again, says, “We’ll do this again,” and rushes out of the room.

“The human engine’s not like a Chevy’s,” Dr. McMenamin says dismissively the next day, when Antonio asks him whether physical contact with her child might help wake Maddalena. The doctor does not know what Brenda has done and would likely fire her if he did. On the way out he pauses in the doorway, rubbing his chin. “I wouldn’t rule it out, though,” he offers. “It hasn’t been proven, of course, but I believe brains can transmit signals to each other—of distress, of joy, of pain. And I never underestimate the power of the maternal bond. When the girl gets stronger, maybe.” Then, with a wave, he wishes Antonio well.

Antonio feels a great fondness for this doctor. He trusts him, as
he does most physicians. Their years in medical school, their seen-it-all nonchalance, win him over. To a doctor like this one, the human body is, in fact, simple as a car engine. Has he not opened the hood of the Chevy a thousand times and examined the same faulty parts, the expected wear-and-tear on the valves? What the Chevy is to Antonio, Maddalena is to this man in the white coat: a machine he will, after a few adjustments, eventually get up and running good as new. And that is how it should be: the dispassionate relationship between mechanic and machine, devoid of mystery, independent of faith. He finds this comforting. And, though he won’t admit what he and Brenda have done, he trusts the doctor’s instincts about the power of the maternal bond.

Until Dr. McMenamin tells Antonio he has never seen a case like Maddalena’s before—and so far, he has not said any such thing—he will wait patiently, as he would if the Chevy needed a new transmission. He will keep reminding himself that his wife is still young, a farm girl healthy and strong as a horse. Women might still die in childbirth in the Old Country, but only because the calendar was stuck on a page a hundred years back. Here, Americans already lived in the future; and in the future, good health was not luck or even one of God’s hard-won rewards. It was an expectation. A right.

None of this explains why you won’t give your daughter a name, Mario might say. If you’re so sure Maddalena will wake up, why not prove it?

Because, for all his faith in doctors, for all the calm he maintains, Antonio is far from sure. When he leaves the hospital at night, he no longer knows his destination. He has not slept in his own bed since Maddalena was taken here. He has slept alongside her on the hospital mattress, in the comfortable chair by the window, or he has not slept at all—just kept walking until the sun rose and it was time to make his way to the Ford plant.

Once, he walked all the way to the neighborhoods across from Wanamaker’s and lay on the grass of a corner lot. The foundation of a new house had just been dug, the concrete perimeter of the basement set in a large square. He gazed into the dark hole and imagined the concrete floor being poured, the wooden beams multiplied and nailed together, the slathering of mortar between the red bricks. Now came the flowered wallpaper, the kitchen tile, Maddalena in velvet gloves and a sequined dress, opening the front door to greet the Christmas Eve guests. How cursed he has been with dreams! This little brick box, the trattoria, the son to carry his name, the blonde Hollywood wife who modeled in Philadelphia and earned per show twice the restaurant’s monthly take. How greedy all these dreams seem now, when his only wish is for Maddalena to do what she’s done every day of their seven years together: open her eyes, say “Antonio,” lay her warm hand on his face.

There is something else he won’t tell Mario, won’t tell anyone. The baby already has a name. During that recent car ride, when he’d passed Riverview Drive so many times that Maddalena asked why he was driving in circles, they had decided. Primo, they would have called him, had she borne a son. The girl: Prima. Either way, it meant “the first.” It was both the break from tradition—no Antonio Jr., no Franco, no Chiara, after her mother—and the bold declaration of hope that led them to the name. It thrilled them. But how could he bestow such a name upon the girl now, as hope faded, and she faced the possibility of being the only, the last?

13
An Unfortunate Romance

T
HOUGH
J
ULIAN HAD BOUGHT
the atlas with his own money and even scheduled the order of continents to cover, Antonio insisted on teaching the geography lessons. At first.

He liked to explain the history behind why each country maintained its particular borders. The problem was that most of the time he’d invent the reasons—a war that never occurred, a treaty that had never been signed—and give Julian a look that dared him to say he was wrong. Julian never dared, of course, though it pained him to hear this man tell his wife that Italy had been one unified power since the fall of Rome, that Belgians spoke Belgian, and that the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected them from the threat of the H-bomb. “Look at this,” Antonio said, tracing his finger eastward, then westward, from Moscow to D.C.; “by the time the bomb got here, we’d be halfway to Chicago in the Chevy.”

“What if they bomb Chicago, too?” she asked.

It wasn’t long before he grew tired of her questions. He spent ten minutes explaining the varied topography of the western United States, and she looked at him blankly, pointed to the Rockies, and said, “So those are mountains?”

Antonio shook his head. “Stick to sewing,” he said.

After spilling wine on Australia—which Maddalena thought
bordered on Germany—Antonio declared the lessons pointless and excused himself for the couch. Julian took over.

“I’m not a very good student,” Maddalena said.

“Sure you are,” said Julian. “It just takes time. The world is very big.”

“Maybe having a baby makes you stupid,” she said. “Lately my head gets fuzzy, like I just woke up, even though it’s the middle of the day.”

“It’s nothing,” Antonio said, matter-of-factly, from the couch. “It’s just your nerves.”

Julian could not find Santa Cecilia on the map, but Rieti and Avezzano—where Maddalena had traveled many times with her father and sisters—did appear as small dots north and east of Rome. He showed her Foggia and Lucera, the towns closest to the village near Pietrafitta, where he had spent the first four years of his life. He remembered little of the village, he said, only the sheep. His father used to hold him on the backs of the ewes and pretend they were horses. When he thought of Italy, Julian could still feel that tickle of wool on his bare legs.

Though Maddalena claimed to want to learn about other countries, she spent most of her time on pages 80 and 81: Italy-Sicily-Switzerland. With Julian’s help, she traced the route she took to America: from an unmarked pocket of the Appenines near Sora, southwest to Frosinone, north to Rome, and up the coast to Genoa, over land she was seeing for the first and, in her mind, last time. From Genoa she’d taken the ship three thousand miles to New York City, then traveled 120 more to Wilmington. It surprised her that the distance from her village to Genoa was not much greater than the distance from New York to Wilmington. That second trip, gazing upon the endless expanse of fields and highway, had seemed much longer. When Julian flipped the pages to show the United States and Italy side by side, she drew back;
“It’s so small!” she said. Her eyes darted back and forth between the two. “If you compare, you think the people in Italy must be suffocating. But we didn’t know any different. Santa Cecilia never once felt small to me.”

Julian opened his hands as if to say, “Of course.”

“Now when I tell people ‘My village had three streets,’ I can’t believe it myself. It doesn’t seem possible.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve seen too much already, more than any of my sisters. Sometimes I think, if I went back, I’d feel like I was suffocating, too.”

“Could be,” Julian said. “But still you want to send me back there. You think I could breathe just fine.”

“You,” she said. “You’re different.” And while he waited for her to tell him why, she turned the page of the atlas back to Italy. Slowly she ran her finger up the Adriatic from Puglia to Abruzzo, then down the Atlantic side from Lazio to Calabria. “I had a friend who moved to Napoli. That’s, what, a hundred miles?”

“A little less,” said Julian.

She had mentioned this friend before, in the same breath as her family. He’d gone south to apprentice with a tailor, then returned to Santa Cecilia. His father and two sisters lived in Philadelphia, but Maddalena had never contacted them.

“Do you hear from him—the tailor?”

She looked over at the couch, where Antonio lay sleeping. “Oh, no,” she said, sitting up straight. “Of course not.”

Julian nodded. He saw in the way she tilted her head—forward and just slightly to the side—that she had a story about him, one she knew she shouldn’t tell. Maybe this tailor had disgraced his family, and because of his actions the father did not open his Philadelphia house to him. Maybe he was the best tailor in Italy but felt he had to do his penance in the village. Julian imagined the Santa Ceciliese spitting on his shop window when they walked by but secretly paying him to mend their clothes. It seemed in
Maddalena’s nature to forgive and take pity on this man, who may have been a deserter or a thief but did not deserve the humiliations of scandal.

“Those villages can be cruel,” said Julian. “Make one mistake, you pay for it the rest of your life.”

Maddalena looked at him. “What kind of mistake?”

“I don’t know,” said Julian, surprised by her defensive tone, the accusatory crease between her eyebrows. “Anything. Desperate men in desperate times, crimes of passion, foolish choices. Take your pick.”

Her face softened. “You made a mistake, then?”

“Me? No. I was thinking of your tailor. From the way you talk but don’t talk about him, it sounds like he did something very wrong.”

Again her eyes went to Antonio. His feet, in sheer black stockings, hung over the arm of the sofa. In the past few minutes, he’d begun to snore.

She thought a moment, walked over to the record player, and turned up Sinatra. Facing her husband, she brushed crumbs from her dress and straightened the waistline. By the time she sat back down, her face had changed again. Gone was both the crease and the softness; a shadow had fallen across her, as it had that first Friday night in this house. It seemed she’d either just been told sad news, or was about to deliver it.

“I said something to upset you,” offered Julian.

“We talk about suffocating,” she began, her voice a whisper over the music and the snores. “I’m suffocating right now, right here. When you don’t say what you feel, what’s in your heart—”